I wish to thank the officer’s and crew of the BLHA for their hospitality and for allowing me to be a part of their group; I look forward to doing it again sometime soon. If you would like more information on the BLHA, please check out their website at http://www.ss310.com/Club and Museum Want ListCurrently we are looking for florescent lamps and starters for the on board lighting on the Batfish. We need F8T5 Lamps and FS-5 Starters. The Bulbs are 12 inches long, and are 8-watts bulbs. All together, the boat has 72 of these with very few actually working. We probably need several Ballast transformers, but I am uncertain of the model and type. The boat also has 12 lamps that are 20-watt lamps and 24 inch long and we need a few of those.Project Completion reportCushcraft A4S Beam Antenna Rebuild ProjectApril 16, 2011After having problems with the feed line, and getting the connectors all repaired, we continued to have problems with the Cushcraft A4S Beam antenna, particularly with the 20 Meter band. The 10 and 15 meter bands seemed to be ok as far as SWR went, but 20M was nearly 3:1 at the band edges and about 2.1:1 at resonance. We were just tuning the antenna with the tuner, but then the received stations were normally at some odd angel to the direction the antenna was pointed……… Way off at times. I know it is normal to get stations off the sides, but when we would turn the antenna to point to the station, it would then be null-ed out. Clearly, something was wrong.Saturday April 16 started out very cold, about 35 degrees, and after several days of rain, it was a cold, moist breeze at the boat, most all wore coats, hats and gloves at 8am when we started. By mid day, it was well into the seventies and hotter than anyone ever thought possible. Several, including myself, reported sun burns from too much sun, and not enough protection… Lesson learned… I hope!Volume1 Issue 3 June 2011As Murphy is always a part of any project, we started out with a long delay, when the keys to the pad-lock on the tower were not the right keys. It took about an hour to finally get it opened and to get the tower tilted over. Once the tower was down, we removed the beam from the mast and sent the tower back up to get it out of the way. Working in 2 man crews, each of the Elements were each removed from the boom, and completely disassembled and inspected for damage. Since the antenna and tower had been reported to have fallen to the ground at one time, we expected to see some damage and repairs to the antenna, but not to the extent we found. The driven element’s mounting block was broken, and fell apart, which explained why the antenna element was hanging at a 45 degree angle from then others when we got there. The 4th element, a parasitic for 10 M, literally feel apart as the element had fractured and broken in the mounting. We are lucky it had not fallen off the antenna and hit the ground. Upon looking at it, it was heavily damaged in the fall and someone had used electrical tape to tape the element up too hold it better in its mounting. I guess it was not fully broken at the time, so it was taped. But then through years of use, the antenna blowing in the wind, the metal fatigued and broke inside the mounting sleeve. The only thing holding the element to the antenna was the electrical tape, and its friction to the inside of the mounting sleeve. This required the fabrication of an all-new element for the antenna to go back up. John N5TBM and James NN5Q did a fabulous ad hock fabrication job of the new 10-meter element!